RECLAMATION & CLOSURE
hat happens
after mining? The possibilities and pitfalls of planning for post-mining land uses
Mining operations create a lot of wealth while they are operating, but what is left behind after closure? CMJ spoke with Jeff Parshley, SRK Group Chairman, in May about recent trends in mine closure. Jeff, who draws on over 35 years of environmental and mine closure experience, discussed the challenges of closure and how companies and communities are repurposing land for other uses after mining. Canadian Mining Journal: You’ve been involved with mine closure for three decades. What are some of the big changes in the field that you’ve seen over the span of your career? When I started doing closure e Parshley work in the early 1990s, the state of Nevada had just introduced two new laws regarding mine closure, and some other jurisdictions around the world were also developing new mine closure requirements. Most of those were not quite as detailed as what Nevada had, but we were all getting started and recognizing the importance of it. What we hadn’t done much of at that time was actually trying to close mines, so it was a decade of discovery. We made mistakes and had a number of successes, and as a result, we were better prepared for what 22 | CANADIAN
MINING JOURNAL
we faced at that beginning of the 2000s, which was the mineral commodity price slump that occurred before the supercycle. During that period, there were a number of bankruptcies around the world that left mines unclosed without an operator to close them and in many cases without enough money and financial assurance to allow the government to close them properly. That was probably the biggest learning at the beginning of the 2000 decade – we realized that although we had spent the ’90s trying to understand the process and the cost of mine closure, our estimates for financial assurance were woefully inadequate. As a result of that, there was a revision of laws in the United States at the federal level and state level in a number of instances. Foreign jurisdictions also made similar changes. Those legal revisions continue today in many developing nations, including recently Kazakhstan. www.canadianminingjournal.com
